Chekhov on Theatre E-Book

Anton Chekhov

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: ... On Theatre
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 426

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A unique collection of everything that Chekhov wrote about the theatre. Chekhov started writing about theatre in newspaper articles and in his own letters even before he began writing plays. Later, he wrote in detail about his own plays to his lifelong friend and mentor Alexei Suvorin, his wife and leading actress, Olga Knipper, and to the two directors of the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. Collected for this volume, these writings reveal Chekhov's instinctive curiosity about the way theatre works – and his concerns about how best to realise his own intentions as a playwright. Often peppery, passionate, even distraught, as he feels his plays misinterpreted or undermined, Chekhov comes over in these pages as a true man of the theatre.

Leseprobe

Chekhovon Theatre

compiled by

Jutta Hercher and Peter Urban

translated, with an introduction and commentary by

Stephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

1. Moscow Theatre, 1881–1885

Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt Again

Hamlet at the Pushkin Theatre

The Baron

Geneviève de Brabant

Fragments of Moscow Theatre Life

2. On Writing, 1883–1904

Authors

Writing

Theatre, Society and the Public

Criticism

Writing for the Theatre

Actors

Acting

Chekhov as Critic

3. Chekhov’s Plays, 1887–1904

Ivanov I

Ivanov II

One-Act Plays

The Wood Demon

Uncle Vanya

The Seagull I

The Seagull II

Three Sisters

The Cherry Orchard

Appendices

The Genesis of Chekhov’s Plays

The Moscow Art Theatre 1898–1904

Chekhov on the Russian Stage 1887–1917

Chekhov’s Principal Correspondents

Index

Copyright Information

Introduction

Chekhov’s ranking among the world’s most frequently performed playwrights, perhaps second only to Shakespeare, is the more remarkable in the light of his relatively meagre dramatic output – a mere handful of full-length plays, and a few one-acts, written in a language which may be regarded as a major obstacle to their global circulation. Yet it is impossible to overestimate the value of his contribution to a medium which he himself often disparages, and the fact that he wrote no theoretical account of his dramatic method, and indeed claimed to know very little about the theatre, is belied by the evidence of this present volume.

From his early years as a schoolboy in provincial Taganrog, slipping furtively into the local playhouse to enjoy a repertoire ranging from operetta and French farce to Hamlet and King Lear, Chekhov was besotted with theatre, and devoted a great deal of his tragically short working life to it, both as creator and critic, at various levels of engagement. These are represented here in discrete sections, beginning with his freelance contributions as a reviewer and essayist for a number of periodicals in Moscow and St Petersburg. Chekhov was also an inveterate and copious letter-writer – almost half of the thirty volumes of his Complete Works, published by the Russian Academy 1974–83, are taken up by his correspondence, and this furnishes a great variety of material, here ordered in a number of categories, from brief comments on other authors’ works, to extended reflections on literature in general and the writer’s place in society. For one so busy, and in poor health, Chekhov was also extremely generous with his time, and a significant amount of his correspondence takes the form of detailed and insightful advice to fellow dramatists, in itself revealing much about the principles from which Chekhov derived his unique theatrical vision.

Chekhov’s involvement with theatre inevitably brought him a good deal of frustration, with the repressive Tsarist censorship and the bureaucracy seemingly inseparable from the exercise of his craft, but also at times disillusionment with the whole process of submitting his vision on paper, to the uncertain judgement of theatre audiences. With a few notable exceptions, Chekhov takes a dim view of actors, and in that respect it is instructive to compare his 1881 reviews of Sarah Bernhardt with his comments on Stanislavsky, two decades later.

Chekhov’s ill-health ensured that his attendance at read-throughs, rehearsals, and even premieres of his work, was limited the more so as his tuberculosis advanced; and the sheer effort it cost Chekhov to write even a few lines is clear in the occasional, almost casual remark in his correspondence with Olga Knipper, and her Moscow Art Theatre colleagues as they prepared Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Among the most detailed and illuminating letters in this section are those he wrote to his close friend and patron Alexei Suvorin, as he undertook a wholesale revision of his first major play Ivanov. Regrettably, Suvorin’s letters to Chekhov appear to have been lost, and although the two collaborated for a while on what Chekhov later completed as The Wood Demon, the process by which that play emerged triumphantly from its chrysalis as Uncle Vanya remains a mystery.

The concluding section of the book contains a brief account of the genesis of Chekhov’s major plays, from early drafts to first important performances, and information on casts, etc., and publication, up until the Revolution. For comparison purposes, the number of performances of Chekhov’s works given by the Moscow Art Theatre each season during the author’s lifetime, is set alongside those of other dramatists, indicating not only the variety and quality of the company’s repertoire, but also the extent to which the Art Theatre’s success was built on Chekhov’s achievement.

1

Moscow Theatre, 1881–1885

Soon after his arrival in Moscow to study medicine, Chekhov began writing for a number of humorous weekly papers under the byline ‘Antosha Chekhonte’, and became a regular contributor to Budilnik (‘The Alarm Clock’) and Zritel’ (‘The Spectator’), in which his review articles on Sarah Bernhardt first appeared. Chekhov earned as little as five kopecks a line for some of these early pieces, even less than his artist-brother Nikolai, who also worked for The Spectator as a freelance illustrator. As Chekhov’s reputation grew, he published more substantial pieces and eventually came to the notice of Nikolai Leikin, editor of the St Petersburg journal Oskolki (‘Fragments’). Leikin commissioned Chekhov to write a weekly column ‘Fragments of Moscow Life’, the general tenor of which was to amuse sophisticated St Petersburgers with the eccentricities of ‘provincial’ Muscovites. For these St Petersburg articles, Chekhov wisely jettisoned his Moscow byline and wrote for Leikin as ‘Ruver’ or ‘Ulysses’.

Sarah Bernhardt

From pole to pole, her train sweeping the length and breadth of all five continents, she who has sailed every ocean, flown up, indeed, to the very heavens – Sarah Bernhardt, renowned a thousand times over, has not disdained to visit our white-clad Moscow.

On Wednesday at approximately half-past six in the evening, two locomotives crept majestically in under the canopy of Kursk Station, and we caught our first glimpse of the legendary, world-famous diva. We saw her, but at what cost? We got our ribs bruised, our feet crushed – our eyes ache from trying to keep them open, pressing the sockets with our fingers in a desperate effort to obtain a better view through the murky atmosphere of Kursk Station platform, at this child of Paris arriving so opportunely to shatter our monstrous peace. And all Moscow stood up on its hind legs…

Two days ago Moscow was aware of the existence of only four elements; now it repeatedly bumps into a fifth. Where it once acknowledged seven wonders of the world, now scarcely half a minute goes by without mention of an eighth. People who have had the immeasurable good fortune to procure even the cheapest ticket are practically dying of impatience, waiting for the evening. The stupid weather, the disgusting state of the pavements, the cost of living, mothers-in-law, debts – all is forgotten. The meanest, scruffiest coachman perched up on his box seat, has an opinion about the new arrival. The newspaper hacks have stopped eating and drinking and run around in every direction. In brief, an actress has become our idée fixe, and we feel as if some neurological derangement is going on inside our heads.

There’s been a frightful amount written about Sarah Bernhardt, and it’s still going on. If we were to put it all together, sell it by weight (at a rouble and a half the pound), and donate the takings to the Society for the Protection of Animals, we swear by our feathers: horses and dogs would be dining at Olivier’s or the Tartar, at the very least.

There’s been a great deal written, and of course a great many lies told. More lies, it seems to me, than truth. The French, the Germans, the negroes, the English, the Hottentots, the Greeks, the Patagonians, the Indians – have all written about her. So we’ll write something about her too; we’ll write, and we’ll try not to lie.1

We won’t even attempt to describe her appearance for two entirely fundamental reasons; in the first place, our talented artist Nikolai Chekhov will provide a portrait of her in the next issue; in the second place, the Parisian-Semitic type doesn’t easily lend itself to description.

Mme Sarah B. was born in Le Havre of a Jewish father and a Dutch mother. Happily, her stay in Le Havre was a short one. Fate – in the shape of grinding poverty – drove her mother to take up residence in Paris. Once in Paris, Sarah recited a fable by La Fontaine with such feeling and expression, for the entrance examination at the Conservatoire, that the examiners unhesitatingly awarded her the top mark, and admitted her to the list of acceptances. If she hadn’t read that fable so feelingly, and received only a bare pass, say, chances are she wouldn’t have had the good fortune to turn up here in Moscow. Sarah was educated in a convent school, and as an incurable romantic, very nearly became a nun. However, the artistic impulse – the creative fire coursing through her veins – put a stop to that intention.

She first appeared on stage in 1863, making her debut at the Comédie-Française, where she suffered a catastrophe, and was hissed off the stage. After that fiasco, with no desire to play second fiddle at the Comédie-Française, she transferred to the Théâtre du Gymnase. Here fortune smiled on her, and she was soon noticed. She didn’t remain long at the Théâtre du Gymnase. One fine morning, the theatre manager received the following note: ‘Don’t count on me. By the time you read these lines, I’ll be far away.’ And indeed, while Monsieur le directeur was opening the letter, and adjusting his spectacles on his nose, Sarah Bernhardt was already on the other side of the Pyrenees.

People in general are terribly ill-mannered. Making them remember you is a difficult business. The shallow-minded French forgot all about Sarah while she travelled from one Spanish staging-post to the next, in the land of bitter oranges and guitars. When she eventually returned to Paris, she attempted to charm her way into all the great bastions of theatre, only to find every door firmly shut. Somehow or other, she managed to land a walk-on part at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, at a salary of twenty-five roubles a month. She clung on to her insignificant little part, whilst eagerly studying all the roles in plays being staged at the Odéon. Eventually her hard work was crowned with success. In 1867, she made her debut at the Odéon in the role of Anna Damb in Kean, and of Zanetta in a play by Coppé. As Zanetta, Sarah was quite unsurpassed. So resounding her triumph, the doyen of French literature, the great Victor Hugo, created the part of the Queen in Ruy Blas for her. Playwrights hitherto microscopic began emerging from obscurity and were made visible, thanks to Sarah’s acting. Indeed, that’s how the work of Coppé first came to light. With her second appearance on the ‘premier stage of France’, the Comédie-Française, her fame grew and became so firmly established that in the whole of Paris, there was not a single shallow-minded Frenchman unaware of ‘notre grande Sarah’.

Sarah’s watchword was ‘quand même’, i.e., ‘even so, regardless’. It’s a fine motto, very impressive, dazzling, stunning indeed, and it brings on a sneeze. Men the world over will testify to the fact that the female ‘quand même’ is more terrible than the male: Sarah’s ‘quand même’ is stubborn and insistent. With it, she flings herself headlong into yawning chasms of a sort from which one can extract oneself only with uncommon intelligence and a will of iron, at the very least. She can pass, as they say, through hell and high water. And ultimately she has become celebrated as the ‘most original woman in the world’.

Above all else, she craves publicity. Publicity is her passion. In the second half of the 1870s, ‘Figaro’ and ‘Gaulois’ did nothing but sing the praises of their ‘grande Sarah’. Whole armies of reporters followed her around, treading on her train. Such vast crowds of people crammed into her reception room as surpassed even a host of creditors pressing in on a merchant’s prodigal son. Publicity is no small matter. It procured a fortune and made a name for Johann Hoff,2 and of course played no little part in Sarah’s fabled exploits.

Most of all, Sarah dislikes Germans… Your good health, Madame!

Sarah Bernhardt competes with all the Muses. She is a sculptor, a painter, a writer, and what not else. Her sculptural group, After the Storm, is a genuinely serious work and was critically acclaimed in the Salon. Her painting is a little weak, but her brushwork is not lacking in broad, lush strokes. In both artforms, she has some talent.

Sarah was in London in 1879, and ‘throughout her entire London season’, wrote ‘Figaro’, ‘not a single Englishman was afflicted with spleen’. Last year, the manager of the Comédie-Française received that note: ‘Don’t count on me, etc…’ And while Monsieur le directeur was unsealing the envelope and placing his spectacles on his nose, Sarah was already at the other side of the ocean, in America.

In America, she performed miracles. She flew by train through a forest fire, fought with Red Indians and tigers, and suchlike. Among other things, she visited that professor of black magic, the wizard Edison, who showed her all his telephones and phonophones. On the evidence of the French artist Robida,3 the Americans drank the whole of Lake Ontario dry, after Sarah had bathed in it. In America she gave (horribile dictu!) a hundred and sixty-seven performances! Her total takings at the box office were so enormous that no professor of mathematics could express them. The French, they say, are already cooling towards her.

When she returned from America, the Comédie-Française didn’t invite her, but no matter. At the present time, she is on her travels. She tours towns and villages all over Europe, harvesting laurel wreaths everywhere – studiously avoiding Berlin. Poor Germans! It’s an ill wind, however – hundreds of thousands of roubles are now left spare, in German pockets, and hundreds of thousands of people can now purchase milk for their babies.

In Odessa, Sarah was welcomed in a rather eccentric fashion. They were delighted, shouted hooray, and threw pebbles at her carriage. Not the done thing, perhaps, but original all the same. One stone actually touched Sarah, the way a tangent touches a circle. Monsieur Jarret, however, got a splinter of carriage glass in his eye. Her debut in the chilly Russian steppe, as you see, was like nothing elsewhere.

We shall communicate the exploits of Sarah in Moscow to you, and we shall do so without prejudice. Like a dutiful host, we can turn a compliment with the best, but we shall criticise the artiste with the utmost severity.

Zritel’ (‘The Spectator’), Nos. 21, 22, November 1881

Sarah Bernhardt Again

The devil knows what!

We wake up in the morning, make ourselves handsome, don our frock coat and gloves and at about twelve noon drive to the Bolshoi Theatre. We arrive home from the theatre, bolt down lunch without chewing, and begin scribbling. At eight p.m. it’s back to the theatre; we return home from the theatre and it’s scribble scribble again until about four a.m. And this is every single day! We think, speak, read, write about nothing except Sarah Bernhardt. Oh, Sarah Bernhardt! This entire ridiculous state of affairs will end up straining this reporter’s nerves ad maximum, our disrupted eating times will result in a severe case of gastric catarrh and we’ll sleep precisely two weeks on the trot, when the estimable diva finally leaves us.

We go to the theatre twice a day, we watch, we listen and listen, and still can’t see or hear anything special. Everything is commonplace beyond expectation and commonplace to the point of disgraceful. We watch Sarah Bernhardt without blinking or wavering, drinking her face in with our eyes straining to discern anything, no matter what, other than a decent actress. What fools we are! We’ve been taken in by all that promising publicity from abroad, and we haven’t seen in her the faintest resemblance to the Angel of Death. That resemblance had been attributed to Sarah (somebody somewhere said), by a certain dying person, gazing at whom Sarah had learned how to exit ad patres at the end of a drama.

So what exactly did we see?

Let us go together, dear reader, to the theatre, and you will see what we have seen… Oh, all right, to Adrienne Lecouvreur.4 We go at 8 p.m. As we approach the theatre, we behold a veritable multitude of two-horse carriages, coachmen, gendarmes, police… The line of coachmen returning from the theatre is literally endless. The assembled crowd is of terrifying proportions. The theatre corridors are jam-packed; every last one of Moscow’s lackeys is there. Since there is an insufficiency of pegs, they don’t hang up the coats but pile them four deep, squeezing them flat and laying them one on top of another, like bricks. We go inside to the heart of things. Starting from the orchestra pit and ending up in the gods is a mass of swarming, crawling, bobbing heads, shoulders, hands, of all possible conditions, to such a point that one can’t help wondering, ‘Are there really so many people in Russia? Dear Lord!’ You look at the audience and the notion of flies buzzing over a table spread with honey instantly springs to mind. It’s packed out even in the boxes: papa sits on a chair, maman sits on papa’s knees, and finally an infant sits on maman’s knees; there’s only one chair in the box. Nor is the audience, it must be said, exactly your normal one. Among the regular theatregoers, the amateurs and connoisseurs, you will see a fair number of people who decidedly never go to the theatre. Here you will find old, dried-up cholerics composed entirely of sinew, doctors of medicine accustomed to going to bed no sooner, and no later, than eleven o’clock. Here also is the devilishly serious master of differential calculus, who wouldn’t know what a theatre poster was, or the difference between the Bolshoi and Salomon’s Circus. Here too are all those high-minded, clever business types who in their intimate conversations dignify theatre with the epithet ‘frivolous’, and regard actors as parasites. In one of the boxes sits enthroned an old woman along with her husband, she stricken with rheumatism, he a deaf old baronet with a nasal voice, both last at the theatre in 1848. The whole world is there.

They knock three times. The very atmosphere breathes of Paris. They don’t ring a bell in Paris, they knock three times. The curtain rises. On stage are Mme Lina Munte and Mme Sidney. You observe a not entirely unfamiliar setting. You saw something similar, it seems, about a year and a half ago, in the pages of Niva or Universal Illustration. All it lacks is Napoleon I, standing half in shadow behind the portière, and those richly decorative, luxurious forms, with which French painters are so lavish. They start babbling and chattering in a French dialect. You strain your ears and as they gather pace, you barely manage to catch the drift of these richly guttural Frenchwomen. You’re more or less au fait with the plot of Adrienne Lecouvreur, so you get a little tired of following the action, and begin to reflect. Two Frenchwomen are on stage, and a number of French gentlemen. Impeccably sumptuous costumes, a language not our own, that uniquely French ability to smile incessantly – your thoughts are transported to: ‘Oh, Paris, my beloved homeland!’ And it all comes back to you – intelligent, pure, joyful, like a pretty young widow freshly out of mourning, with its palaces, houses, innumerable bridges over the Seine. In the faces and costumes of these frivolous Frenchmen, you rediscover the Comédie-Française, with its first and second tiers of seats, on one of which the Vicomte Paul de Coq is solidly ensconced. You dream, and before your very eyes one after another fleetingly appears: the Bois de Boulogne, the Champs Elysées, the Trocadero, Daudet and his long hair, Zola and his little round beard, our own I.S.Turgenev, and our ‘warm-hearted’ Mme Lavretskaya,5 living the high life and scattering Russian tenrouble notes left and right.

The first act comes to an end. The curtain falls. From the audience, not a sound… Silence of the grave, even up in the gods.

Sarah Bernhardt appears in person in the second act. They present her with a bouquet (one can’t say it was bad, but without wishing to offend anybody, it wasn’t particularly special). Sarah Bernhardt isn’t at all like the Sarah Bernhardt of the postcards on sale at Avanzo and Dazario. She looks younger in the postcards, and shows up to better advantage.

Act Two comes to an end. The curtain falls and the audience applauds, but rather languidly. They applaud Fedotova and Kochetova much more energetically. But see how Sarah Bernhardt takes her bow! Her head slightly tilted to one side, she emerges from the upstage-centre door, walks slowly and majestically forward without looking anywhere to the foot-lights, like a high priest advancing to perform the sacrifice, and describes a sort of arc in the air with her head, not visible to the naked eye. Her whole body seems to say, ‘Well, go on – have a good look. Look and wonder, be amazed, and give thanks that you have had the honour to behold the “most original woman in the world”’ – notre grande Sarah!

It would be interesting to know what opinion these guests have of our audience. A very strange audience! The Americans drank Lake Ontario dry, the English harnessed themselves to her carriage instead of horses, an entire army of Indians surrounded the train she was travelling in to steal her treasures, but our audience neither laughs nor cries, and applauds exactly as if they were frozen stiff, or had their hands stuffed into quilted mittens.

‘Ignoramuses!’ – no doubt that’s what Sarah’s companions will be thinking. ‘They don’t laugh or cry because they don’t know French. They’re not craning their necks and twisting in their seats from sheer delight, because they haven’t the slightest understanding of Sarah’s genius!’ It’s quite possible that’s what they’ll think. The whole world knows that foreigners don’t understand our audiences. However, we’ve had a long look at these audiences and that’s why we can ‘make so bold as to offer a judgement upon them’.6 The theatre was indeed jam-packed with ignoramuses, who could speak French as well as Sarah Bernhardt herself. We’ve seen connoisseurs, amateurs, afficionados in the gods, who know precisely how many hairs are on M. Muzil’s head; who can spray your face with saliva, and knock over a lamp flapping their arms, without apologising, if you start to argue with them about which is better, Lensky or Ivanov-Kozelsky.7 In the orchestra pit, instead of double basses, percussion and flutes, sits ensconced the very salt of the earth. The audiences who applaud M. Muzil because he ‘speaks funny’ don’t come to Sarah Bernhardt’s performances – there’s no reason why they should. They’re more interested in seeing Tanti the Clown than Sarah Bernhardt. We’ve seen audiences, spoiled by the acting of the late Sadovsky, Zhivokin, and Shumsky,8 and accustomed to performances by Samarin and Fedotova, brought up on Turgenev and Goncharov,9 but importantly, in recent years, audiences who have had to endure a great many instructive sorrows. In brief, we see an audience extremely difficult to satisfy, a most discerning public. It’s not surprising, then, that they’re not going to faint when Sarah Bernhardt, a minute before the event, goes into energetic convulsions, signalling her imminent death.

We are far from impressed by Sarah Bernhardt’s talent. She doesn’t have what our distinguished public loves about Fedotova. She doesn’t possess that vital spark which alone is capable of moving us to hot tears, to fainting. Every sigh of Sarah Bernhardt, her tears, her convulsive death throes, the sum of her acting – is nothing more than a game, a clever and perfectly learnt lesson. A lesson, dear reader, and nothing more! Being a very clever woman, and knowing what’s impressive and what isn’t, a woman of impeccable taste, a student of human nature, a woman who is everything one could wish for, she is able to perform accurately all those tricks, which by the will of fate, are sometimes produced in the heart of man. Her every step is profoundly thought out, underlined a hundred times. Out of her heroines, she makes extraordinary women, just like herself… In performance, she aims not for the natural, but for the extraordinary. Her aim is to stun, to surprise, to dazzle…

You watch Adrienne Lecouvreur, but it’s not Adrienne Lecouvreur you see, but a very clever, very impressive Sarah Bernhardt. In her acting, it isn’t genius that shines through, but gigantic, monumental labour… That’s the key to this enigmatic actress: sheer hard work. In every role she plays, major and minor alike, there is not the slightest detail that hasn’t passed through the refining fire of that endeavour. Her work rate is phenomenal. If we were as industrious as she, what wouldn’t we have written! We would have covered the very walls and ceilings of our editorial office in the tiniest, most minute handwriting. We envy, and most reverently bow our heads before such industry. And we sincerely advise our gentleman actors of the first and second rank to learn from our guest how to work. Our actors – meaning no offence to anybody – are terribly lazy! To them, study is worse than a bitter pill. The fact that they’re doing nothing, at least the majority of them, we can deduce from the way they’re stuck in the one spot: they don’t go forward, they don’t go anywhere. If they worked as hard as Sarah Bernhardt, knew as much as she knows, they would go far! To our heartfelt regret our servants of the Muses, great and small, are seriously handicapped in the sphere of knowledge, and knowledge is acquired, if one is to believe the old axiom, through work alone.

We watched Sarah Bernhardt, and experienced inexpressible delight at her diligence. At certain points in her performance we were almost moved to tears. The only reason tears wouldn’t flow was that the spell was broken by the sheer artifice of it all. Had it not been for that vulgar artifice, that calculated trickery and exaggeration – well, my word of honour, we would have wept, and the theatre would have trembled at the applause. ‘Oh, genius!’ as Cuvier10 said, ‘Thou dost not sit easily with facility!’ And Sarah Bernhardt’s passion is so facile!

The company on tour with Sarah Bernhardt, one might say, are fair to middling, composed of fit, well-built, strapping young men. Bearing in mind the extraordinary accidents that might have befallen her (being attacked by tigers, Red Indians, etc.), Sarah was well advised to take such muscular types along with her.

These Frenchmen comport themselves on stage admirably. One Moscow critic, sweating blood while singing Sarah Bernhardt’s praises, noted among other things her ability to listen. We acknowledge that faculty, not just of her, but the whole company. The French listen brilliantly, and thanks to that they never feel superfluous on stage, they know what to do with their hands, and don’t upstage one another. That’s not the case with our actors. That doesn’t happen here. Here, M. Maksheyev is declaiming his monologue, while M. Vilde, listening to him, fixes his gaze on some indeterminate point and starts coughing impatiently. So it’s practically written on his face – this doesn’t concern me, friend. The French company is extremely competent, well disciplined, but… untalented.

Neither one thing nor the other.

However, let us return to Adrienne Lecouvreur. Or rather, tell you what, dear reader… You’ve had your fill of my musings, and I’m terribly sleepy. It’s four o’clock, and my neighbour’s charming cockerel is clearing its throat. My eyes are closing, as if they’re glued shut, and I’m stabbing the written page with my nose…

It’s Sarah Bernhardt again tomorrow – ah!

Anyway, I’m not going to write any more about her, even if the editor pays me fifty kopecks a line. I’m all written out! Enough!

Zritel’ (‘The Spectator’), Nos. 23, 24, December 1881

Hamlet at the Pushkin Theatre

There was once a very wise man. And this wise man was not of this world; he didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t sleep, but spent all his time on his studies. A dressing gown was his only stitch of clothing and a small library, crammed with books, was his only place of rest.

‘You should get some sleep, Herr Professor!’ his cook would say to him at midnight every night. ‘Nonsense!’ he would reply. (Sleep? Nonsense! Silly old fool!)

‘Will you have some dinner, Herr Professor?’ his cook would ask him at noon every day. ‘There’s no time!’ was his reply.

One day I met the Professor in a certain… in a not very nice place! He was quaffing champagne like a cavalryman, and sitting beside a rather attractive, buxom young Frenchwoman.

‘Herr Professor, what are you doing?’ I exclaimed, pale with astonishment.

‘A very stupid thing, my son!’ replied the wise man, pouring me a glass of champagne, ‘I’m doing something extremely stupid.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘I’m clearing the atmosphere, my son – blowing away a few cobwebs. Here’s to women and wine!’

I had a drink, and turned even more pale with astonishment.

‘My son!’ went on the wise man, toying with the young Frenchwoman’s hair, ‘Storm clouds have been gathering in my head, the atmosphere has become heavy, a whole multitude of things have piled up. It needs some air let in, needs cleaning out, everything put back in its place, and that’s why I’m doing this stupid thing. Stupidity can be very silly, but it’s often refreshing. Yesterday I was like rotting grass, and tomorrow morning, o bone discipule, you will see me revitalised, a new man. Long live stupidity once a year! Vivat stultitia!

We finished our drinks.

If stupidity occasionally has a refreshing effect, how much more does its opposite extreme!

Nothing stands in more need of refreshment than our theatre. The atmosphere is leaden, oppressive. Inches deep in dust, foggy, and boring – one goes to theatre, to be honest, because there’s nowhere else to go. You look at the stage, yawning, and swearing under your breath.

And you won’t freshen up the theatre atmosphere with stupidity for one simple reason: the stage is already too well versed in stupidity. It will have to be refreshed by another extreme. At that extreme stands Shakespeare.

Is there any point in staging Hamlet at the Pushkin Theatre? That question is asked many times. And it’s a frivolous question. Shakespeare must be produced everywhere, for refreshment’s sake, if not for education, or any more or less exalted aim.

Hamlet on the stage of the Pushkin was greeted with pleasure.11 There was a huge audience and the performers were delighted. Nobody yawned or felt bored, despite the shortcomings listed below. Nobody felt like leaving the theatre – they were happy to stay put.

M. Ivanov-Kozelsky isn’t very strong as Hamlet. He has his own interpretation. Having one’s own interpretation isn’t a sin, but you do need to interpret it in such a way as not to offend the author. For the entire first act, M. Ivanov-Kozelsky snivelled. Hamlet wouldn’t know how to snivel. A man’s tears are precious, and Hamlet’s especially; on stage they need to be carefully husbanded, not poured out willy-nilly. M. Ivanov-Kozelsky was desperately afraid of the Ghost, so afraid that we felt sorry for him. He chewed up and practically mangled the whole speech to his father. Hamlet was an indecisive man, but no coward – moreover, he was already prepared for his meeting with the Ghost. The scene in which Hamlet makes his companions swear by his sword was unsuccessful. Ivanov-Kozelsky didn’t so much speak as hiss, like a goose being chased by little boys. In his conversations with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, Ivanov-Kozelsky also lacked dignity, posturing, and so on, and so forth. We could fill a great many pages, if we were to describe Ivanov-Kozelsky’s shortcomings. Plenty of feeling, much heart-rending soulfulness, but too little of the most important things. Those most important things are simply beyond M. Ivanov-Kozelsky. It’s not enough to feel emotion, and be able to convey that emotion; it’s not enough to be an artist, you need to have multifaceted intelligence as well. Imagination is essential to portray Hamlet. The scene with his mother is beautifully played. The same might also be said of the graveyard scene. There is much that is excellent about Ivanov-Kozelsky’s performance, and that excellence can be attributed to his ability to feel. But that’s all! He emphasised every word, observed every movement, calculated every step. That deficiency is the bugbear with all beginners. And a death scene complete with fearsome voice and convulsions can only betray a natural death.

Claudius wasn’t bad. He couldn’t manage to kneel, though. The Queen, the Ghost, Horatio and the others were bad. In passing, the First Player (Novikov) was rather good, and Ophelia’s voice was better, so I’m told, than Mme Baranova’s, who actually wasn’t too bad. Now to the purely external features of the affair.

The stage is too small, and the setting is poor. The grandiose declamations of the King were on the wrong scale for the tiny rooms representing the Palace, but that can’t be helped. Half a loaf’s better than no bread. M. Ivanov-Kozelsky’s outlandish costumes don’t suit him as well as M. Lensky’s frock coat. Furthermore, why is Horatio tricked out with a helmet? And why did they leave things out of the text, that should have been kept in?

However, these minor imperfections pale into insignificance against the brilliant idea that first came into someone’s head, to present Hamlet on the stage of the Pushkin.

Better badly staged Hamlet, than a boring non-event.

Moskva (‘Moscow’), 19 January 1882

The Baron

The Baron is a scrawny little old man in his sixties. His neck forms an obtuse angle, soon to become a right angle, with his spinal column. He has a large angular head, bleary eyes, a lumpy nose and a livid chin. His entire face has a slight blue tinge, most probably because the alcohol is kept in a cupboard which the props man rarely locks. Furthermore, apart from that alcohol, the Baron also consumes the champagne which is often to be found in the dressing rooms, in abandoned bottles and glasses. His cheeks and the bags under his eyes hang trembling, like rags on a washing line. His bald cranium has a greenish tinge, caused by the lining of a fur hat with ear-flaps on it, which the Baron, when he isn’t wearing it, leaves over an unused gas tap behind the third row of flats. His voice trembles like a saucepan simmering on the hob. And his clothes? Frankly, if you’re going to laugh at his clothes, it’s because you have no respect for authority, which does you little credit. His brown frock coat, with no buttons, the elbows worn shiny and the lining turned into a sort of fringe, is quite a remarkable coat. It hangs on the Baron’s narrow shoulders like a broken coat-hanger, but… yes, well? Well, it once enveloped the talented body of one of the greatest comedians. His velvet waistcoat with pale-blue flowers may possess a score of tears and innumerable stains but it’s impossible to throw it out, if it was found in a hotel room once occupied by the formidable Salvini!12 And who can swear that the great tragedian himself never wore this waistcoat? It was discovered the very next day after this giant of an artist departed, so we can be sure this isn’t a fake we’re discussing here. And the cravat that keeps the Baron’s neck warm is no less remarkable. It’s something to be proud of, although from a strictly hygienic and aesthetic standpoint, it would be sensible to replace it with another, a little more substantial and less filthy. It was cut out of the remnants of that great cloak which covered the shoulders of Ernesto Rossi,13 when he spoke with the witches in Macbeth.

‘My cravat still smells of King Duncan’s blood!’ the Baron would often say, searching it for fleas. You can, however, mock the Baron’s multicoloured striped breeches as much as you like. No famous personage ever wore them, although the actors used to joke about them, claiming that the breeches had been stitched from the sails of the ship that carried Sarah Bernhardt to America. They had been purchased from the opener of Box No.16. Summer and winter alike, the Baron also used to wear rubber galoshes over his boots, to keep the draughts blowing up from under the prompter’s box away from his rheumaticky old legs. The Baron is only ever seen at three locations: in the box office, the prompter’s box, or backstage, in the gentlemen’s dressing rooms. Anywhere else, he simply doesn’t exist, and can’t even be imagined. He spends the night in the box office, and during the day, notes down the names of people reserving the dressing rooms, or plays draughts with the cashier. The scrofulous old cashier is the only person who ever listens to the Baron and responds to his questions. In the prompter’s box, the Baron fulfils his sacrosanct obligations. It is there that he earns his morsel of daily bread. This box is painted a gleaming white only on the outside. By contrast, the inner walls are covered in spiders’ webs, cracks and splinters. It smells of damp, dried fish, and alcohol. During the act intervals, the Baron wanders into the gents’ dressing rooms. People coming in for the first time, burst out laughing and applaud at the sight of the Baron, mistaking him for an actor.

‘Bravo! Bravo!’ they shout, ‘That’s a fantastic make-up job! What a hilariously funny face! And where on earth did you dig up that costume? It’s so original!’

Poor Baron! Certainly no one could possibly imagine that this might be his actual physiognomy. In the dressing rooms, he delights in the contemplation of celebrities, or if there aren’t any, he sometimes emboldens himself to join in the conversation of the others. Nobody listens to his superfluous comments, which smell faintly of the lamp, and get on everyone’s nerves; they unceremoniously ignore him. Generally speaking, people give the Baron short shrift. If he gets under the actors’ feet, they tell him to clear off! If he prompts too quickly or too loud, they swear at him and threaten him with a fine or dismissal. He is the butt of most of the backstage jokes and ribaldry. People quite brazenly make witty comments at his expense, but he never reacts. That’s what happened twenty years ago, when somebody nicknamed him the Baron, but in twenty years, not once has he protested about this appellation. They also make him copy out an actor’s part again, without paying him. They can get away with anything. If somebody should step on his toes, he smiles, apologises, and looks upset. Slap his wrinkled old cheeks in public, and I give you my word, he won’t even complain. Tear a strip of lining off his famous beloved waistcoat, as a jeune premier has done more than once, and he will content himself with blinking his eyes and reddening slightly. That shows how downtrodden and humble the man is. Nobody respects him. While he’s alive, they put up with him, and when he dies he’ll be swiftly forgotten. What a pathetic creature!

However, there was a time once when he just failed to become the comrade and brother of those he so venerated and loved more than his own life. (He couldn’t help loving people who were now and again Hamlet or Franz Moor!14) He just missed becoming an actor himself, and he surely would have, had a ridiculous little detail not prevented it. He had plenty of talent, and the will besides – he even had a patron in those early days, but he lacked one small thing – confidence. He always had the impression that all those heads, scattered throughout the five tiers of the theatre from top to bottom, were going to burst out laughing and hissing, if he allowed himself to appear on stage. So he would go pale, then red in the face, and be struck dumb with terror whenever anyone suggested he should make his debut.

‘I want to wait a little while,’ he would say.

And so he waited until he was too old and worn out, and fetched up, thanks to a patron, in the prompter’s box.

He became a prompter, but that’s not too bad. Henceforth he couldn’t be chased out of the theatre for not having a ticket – this is an authorised person. He sits in front of the first row of seats, with a better view than anybody else, and doesn’t have to spend a single kopeck. That’s good. He is happy and contented.

He acquits himself well in his task. Before the performance, he reads through the play several times so as not to make mistakes, and by the time the first bell rings, he’s already sitting in his box, leafing through his script. You would be hard pressed to find a more conscientious person in the theatre than him.

And yet he must be dismissed. Disturbances are not to be tolerated in the theatre, and the Baron at times creates terrible disturbances. He’s a man for scandal.

When people are performing especially well on stage, he lifts his eyes from his script, and ceases prompting. And he often interrupts his reading in order to cry, ‘Bravo! Excellent!’ He even takes it upon himself to applaud when the audience isn’t doing so. On one occasion, he actually told them to shush! and very nearly got the sack.

Just watch him muttering in his foul-smelling box. He goes red in the face, turns pale, gesticulates, mutters louder than he should, gasps. Sometimes he can be heard as far away as the corridors, where the box-openers are yawning, waiting by the coats. He even permits himself, from his box, to shout abuse and offer advice to the actor:

‘Your right hand – higher!’ he often whispers. ‘You’re supposed to be delivering a fiery speech, but your face is like ice! You’re all wrong for this part, you’re too inexperienced! You should have seen Ernesto Rossi in this part! This is a travesty! Stop hamming it up! My God, he’s ruined everything with his vulgar mannerisms!’

And all this sort of stuff he’s muttering instead of reading his script. It’s sheer folly, and not to be tolerated. If he’d been shown the door, the public would never have been witness to the recent scandal.

This is the incident we’re referring to:

They were playing Hamlet. The theatre was full. People are as eager to hear Shakespeare today as they were a hundred years ago. Whenever they perform Shakespeare, the Baron is at fever pitch. He drinks too much, talks too much, and rubs his temples with his fists incessantly… Behind those temples, a fierce work is positively seething. His old man’s brain is being gnawed by a raging envy, despair, hatred, dreams… He should be playing Hamlet, although a humped back and alcohol which the props man forgot to lock away sit ill with Hamlet. It should be his part, not these pygmies who are lackeys today, pimps tomorrow, and Hamlet the day after tomorrow! For forty years he’s been studying, suffering, eaten up by this dream… Death is not far off. It will come soon, and expel him from the theatre for ever. If just once in his life he could savour the joy of going on stage in that princely cloak, beside the sea, atop the cliffs, that bleak deserted place…

… Which by itself would lead us to despair,

When we look down from there to the abyss

And hear the distant crashing of the waves…15

If dreams can so consume us not even in one day, but in one hour, well then, with what fire the bald Baron would burn if his dream ever assumed the form of reality!

On the evening described, he was ready to swallow the entire world from envy and rage. They had given the part of Hamlet to a young man with a feeble tenor voice and red hair into the bargain. Surely Hamlet wasn’t red-haired? The Baron was sitting in his box as if on live coals. When Hamlet wasn’t on stage, he was relatively calm, but the moment the feeble tenor appeared, he started to twist and turn, fidget in his seat and groan. His whispering sounded more like moaning than reading. His hands trembled, the pages got mixed up, the candleholders swam in and out of his vision. His gaze was riveted on Hamlet’s face, and he stopped prompting… He felt a sudden irrepressible urge to tear out every last hair from that red head. Better a bald Hamlet than a red-haired Hamlet! If they wanted a travesty, let them go the whole hog, damn them!

By the second act, he had given up prompting altogether, and sniggered maliciously, swore and hissed. Fortunately for him, the actors knew their parts and didn’t notice his silence.

‘This is a fine Hamlet! Oh, yes indeed!’ he swore, ‘Ha! Ha! These jumped-up creatures don’t know their place! They should be chasing after their little dressmakers, not acting on a stage. If Hamlet had been as stupid-looking as that, Shakespeare wouldn’t have written his tragedy, that’s for sure!’

When he tired of heckling, he started giving the red-haired actor a lesson. Waving his arms and grimacing, reading, and thumping his book with his fist, he demanded the actor should follow his advice. He needed to rescue Shakespeare from this outrage, and for Shakespeare he was ready to do anything – even a hundred thousand scandals!

Throughout his conversation with the Players, Hamlet was execrable, hamming it up like that so-called ‘actor’, of whom Hamlet himself had said, ‘I would have such a fellow whipped…’16 Choking with fury, and banging his bald cranium against the roof of his box, he placed his left hand on his breast and gestured grandly with his right. The old worn-out voice interrupted the red-haired actor and obliged him to turn and face the prompter’s box:

… Roasted in wrath and fire,

And thus o’ersized with coagulate gore,

With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus

Old grandsire Priam seeks…17

With his body halfway out of his box, the Baron then nodded to the First Player, and added in a voice no longer declamatory, but disdainful and spent: ‘Continue!’

The First Player continued, but not right away. He hesitated a moment, and during that moment, a profound silence reigned in the theatre. It was the Baron himself that broke the silence, when trying to get back into his box, he bumped his head again. A laugh was heard.

‘Bravo for the drummer!’ someone shouted in the gods. They thought it was the old percussionist, dozing in the orchestra pit, and not the prompter, who had interrupted Hamlet. The percussionist waved in mock salute to the gods, and the whole theatre laughed in response. Audiences love such incidents in the theatre, and if they presented these instead of plays, they would pay twice the price for a seat.

The First Player continued, and little by little, calm was restored.

Hearing the laughter, however, the hapless Baron blushed with shame and clutched at his bald cranium with his hands, assuredly forgetting that his hair – once admired by pretty girls – had vanished. This time, the entire town and the massed ranks of the satirical journalists would not only mock him, he would be driven out of the theatre! He burned with the shame of it, accusing himself, yet his every limb trembled with exultation: he had made a speech on stage!

‘This is no business of yours, you rusty old door lock,’ he thought. ‘You should be content to prompt if you don’t want to be treated like one of the lackeys. But it was a disgrace, nonetheless! That red-haired boy doesn’t know the first thing about acting! Do people really need to act like that?’

And fixing his gaze once more on the actor, he started muttering advice again. But again, he couldn’t restrain himself, and made the audience laugh. When the actor, in the final monologue of the second act, paused briefly to shake his head in silence, the prompter’s voice, filled with pride, with contempt, with loathing, but alas, already vanquished by time, and impotent, rose up from the box.

Bloody, bawdy villain!

Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!18

After a silence of ten seconds, the Baron sighed deeply, and added, already less forcefully:

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave…19

That might have been the voice of the authentic Hamlet, and not the red-haired Hamlet, if old age didn’t exist on earth. Old age wastes and renders many things impossible.

Poor Baron! He’s not the first, and he won’t be the last.

Now they’re going to sack him from the theatre. Such a measure, I’m sure you’ll agree, is inevitable.

Mirskoi tolk (‘Worldly Wisdom’), 20 November 1882

Geneviève de Brabant

Comic opera in four acts and nine scenes.20

Margrave Sifroid, Duke of Curaçao (M. Volkhovskoy). Married to Geneviève (Mme Belskaya). Dull-witted and as deaf as a post. Unhappy because he has no heir. Somewhere, at some time, a sorcerer laid a spell on him. He sings like a cockerel, and plays with dolls. M. Volkhovskoy is a past-master at portraying imbeciles. He’s always quite good.

Drogant, a young cook; a soft voice, but rather pleasant (Mme Ryuban). Head over heels in love with Geneviève. Serenades her under her window.

Drogant wishes to become a page. He bakes a pie, and lies to the Duke that anyone who eats it will be freed from a magic spell. Alas, they believe him, eat the pie, and make him a page. Now what?

The Duke bolts the pie down, experiences all manner of emotions, goes to Geneviève’s room, and makes an impassioned declaration of love. Halfway through his declaration, he suddenly clutches his stomach, has to postpone it to another day, and switches from poetry to prose. Drogant meanwhile tries to console poor Geneviève, on whom ‘nothing seems to work’.

Spying on the couple meanwhile is the rascally Gauleaux, the Duke’s Prime Minister, chief counsellor, and speechwriter. This wretch is also in love with the Duchess, and dreams of the ducal crown. The evil demon of the operetta. One of the least successful roles. M. Leonidov does well to ham it up.

The Duke has eaten too much and is still clutching his stomach, lying on his bed. He is groaning and in tears, delirious. Gauleaux appears and informs him of his wife’s treachery. The Duke orders, ‘Kill Drogant, and bury Geneviève alive!’ Frightful! As Gauleaux goes out, Sifroid sees the shadow of Drogant outside his window.

‘I’m going to give him a good soaking,’ he says, and pours a ladleful of water out of the window. The water lands not on Drogant, but on his all-powerful feudal superior, Charles Martel, a large fat man with a petrol can on his head. (M. Chernov having suddenly taken ill, I don’t remember now who played the part.21) Martel sings, swears, and commands his vassal, the Duke